Supposing a doctor tries to fill in as a veternarian with no special training himself. Would he be able to be effective at all?
What about the opposite–would a vet be able to fake his way as a general practitioner?
I suspect a vet would do better with humans than a human doc would with animals, because human patients can at least usually talk to you. But I wouldn’t want a vet treating me for much of anything beyond a scraped knee or something of that nature only because they don’t know stuff like drug dosages (and appropriate drugs, for that matter) for humans.
All of this is pulled completely out of thin air; perhaps we have a vet lurking somewhere?
IANAD, but I do work closely with veterinarians as a technician. I’ve seen many an MD try to tell my DVM’s what’s wrong with their pet. They’re usually wrong.
My most memorable was when an MD told me she thought her dog had hemorrhoids. I told her dogs don’t get hemorrhoids, but he may have an anal gland issue. She wisely stated that she should stick to human medicine! (Turned out he did have an impacted anal gland, she caught it before it abscessed)
I would imagine DVM’s would have similar issues. A mammal is not a mammal is not a mammal.
Vets have experience on many more different makes and models.
Somebody was watching MASH* on the Ion Network, yesterday!:)
Hawkeye operated on a German Shepard from a K9 Unit.
That’s the kind of thing I think an MD could not do. My understanding is that surgery involves a precisely laid out set of cuts, the position of which is laid out by pre-existing medical knowledge of where the various organs and veins and things are in the human body. Someone trying to figure that stuff out on the fly would be sure to kill his patient by nicking an artery or slicing into an important organ he didn’t know was there–I suspect.
But I’m no doctor.
-FrL-
I wouldn’t dream of trying to fill in as a vet, or give more than basic first aid to an animal.
Though some of what I have to deal with counts as vetinary medicine, I suppose.
I’d actually guess that a good general surgeon could probably cope with basic mammalian abdominal surgical procedures. Slow but steady incisions with proper attention to tying off bleeding vessels is pretty much SOP for all surgeons. And with larparoscopes, it’s even less bloody.
Chest cutting might get more difficult, as would mucking around in the neck.
The NC State Vet college has had human surgeons operate on a few animals.
I suspect that if the vet in question mostly worked on apes and chimps, he would have an easier time with QtM’s patients.
All I’m saying…
Heh. Apes and chimps probably wouldn’t lie to me about how their terrible back pain needs oxycodone, and how they’ll sue if I don’t give it to them.
Well played, sir, well played.
Yeah, but they could easily tear you to pieces if they were so inclined.
If I were on a desert island and had only a auto mechanic or a veterinarian to remove my appendix, I’d go with the vet. I think it would be the muzzle that I would hate the most.
Well, I definitely know a doctor (not a surgeon), who was caught rooting around in the clinic supply closet. When a nurse asked what he was doing, he replied “Looking for sutures. My wife is out of town for the weekend, and I’ll be damned if I have to pay a vet $300 to neuter my dog!”
I know this sounds like a FOAF-type story, but a) I know the doctor (though not his dog), and b) the story’s been confirmed from multiple sources.
He shoulda made a couple of phone calls. Around here the county will do it for $35.
Take it from me — those cone-shaped head collars are far worse.
They itch too.
I had a friend who was a vet. He understood the basic concepts (infection = treat with antibiotics, torn muscle = rest and/or surgery, congestive heart failure = treat with diuretics, etc.) but he wouldn’t dare make a guess as to whether one drug was more effective than another or take a chance on the dosage. On the other hand, he could suture with the best of them.
I saw a programme where a British vet who had to perform a complex gynaecologial procedure on an ape, never attempted before, observed a surgeon carrying out the operation on a human. Out of interest the surgeon then observed the vet operating.
That’s my thought, even if they could fake it with dogs or cats, I think they’d show their ignorance when someone brings a water dragon.
I’m not a vet but I will be in a few months.
Not to brag, but I think I could do better on a human than a Human doctor could do on most animal species. Beyond familiar monogastrics like dogs and cats, the anatomy of mammals starts to diverge pretty quickly and pretty significantly. A human doctor wouldn’t have any exposure to that and would be at a loss when sorting out basic physiology problems. Is the cow in pain because her abomasum is distended with gas, or does she have a piece of metal poking into her pericardium? And, even among dogs and cats, there are differences that make certain diseases more or less likely for a given set of symptoms Acute hindlimb paralysis in a dog is likely a blown vertebral disk, but acute hindlimb paralysis in a cat is more likely to be a clot in the artery that feeds the back half of the body.
Conversely, I might not know human drugs and dosages off the top of my head, but I’m familiar enough with the basic physiology that I have a reasonable shot of figuring out the basic problem. Then, I can look up which drugs and dosages to try.
That said, I would not even think of trying to fix a human unless it was a dire situation and I was the only option. I probably wouldn’t even offer unless it was some sort of straightforward trauma issue that just needs suturing. For example, I was helping at a county fair when someone got trampled by an unruly steer. Everyone was suddenly looking to me to help, so I did what I knew and kept the guy quiet and bandaged and conscious while the paramedics were called. I was also able to accurately describe his injuries, which was handy because the un-trained folks there were conflating things, having never really seen injuries before. That’s about as far as I ever want to treat humans.